Launch budget, costed.
Also called: Go-to-market budget · Launch spend plan · Acquisition budget · Marketing spend allocation
A costed plan for what you spend to launch, where it goes, and the return each pound has to earn back.
Set a total launch spend, split it across channels, and cap what you pay to win a customer below the margin that customer leaves you. If acquisition cost beats per-unit margin, the spend pays back. If it doesn’t, you are buying losses.
What a launch budget is
A launch budget is arithmetic, not ambition. It answers three questions in order: how much you will spend in total, how that spend splits across channels, and what return each pound must earn for the spend to be worth making. Skip any one and you are guessing.
The number that governs everything is your per-unit margin: retail price minus the cost to make and ship one unit. That margin is the most you can afford to pay to acquire a customer and still come out ahead. Customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is total spend divided by customers won. The whole budget lives or dies on one comparison: CAC against margin.
So you do not start with “what’s a normal marketing budget?”. You start with the margin, set a CAC ceiling below it, and work backwards to the spend that ceiling allows. A pound spent where CAC sits under margin compounds into profit. A pound sprayed at a channel you cannot measure is a pound you will never see again.
The two numbers that decide it
- Per-unit margin. Price minus full landed unit cost. This is your acquisition headroom. Everything you pay to win a sale comes out of this, so it is the ceiling, not the target.
- CAC. What you actually pay to win one customer. Below margin, the spend pays back. At or above margin, you are funding losses and calling it growth.
A worked launch budget
Here is the launch budget we built for the proofing box, so you can see the shape of a real one rather than a generic template. The product retails at £149 on a £38–55 bill of materials, bootstrapped with a small grant, first run 500 to 1,000 units. Every pound was watched.
Notice the budget never names a channel before it names a number. The Sourdough School slot got the biggest share because it reached the exact baker who would pay £149, which kept its CAC lowest. The test pot existed so a new channel could prove itself on 10% before it was trusted with more.
How it fits the bigger picture
The launch budget is a Stage 10 Deliver activity. It is shaped by the pricing and margin work done earlier, and it feeds straight into the marketing plan (10.20.01), which turns the budget’s allocation into the actual campaign, calendar and messages that spend it.
What it can do
It forces the spend to defend itself against the margin before a pound leaves the account. It tells you the most you can pay for a customer, where that money should go first, and at what point a channel is losing you money rather than making it. It turns “we should do some marketing” into a plan with a stop rule.
What it can’t do
It can’t tell you the real CAC of a channel you have never run; those are estimates until the first spend reports back. And it can’t fix a thin margin. If the gap between price and unit cost is too small to fund acquisition, the answer is in the pricing and the bill of materials, not the budget.
See the full 10-stage process →
Try it yourself
Start with one number: your per-unit margin (price minus full landed unit cost). Set a CAC ceiling comfortably below it. Pick a total spend you can lose without hurting production. Split it across no more than three channels, weighted to where your exact buyer already is. Then write the stop rule: the CAC at which you cut a channel. If you cannot say what each pound should earn back, you are not ready to spend it.
Want to size the margin first? Start the Free Sprint → and the GPT will help you pressure-test the numbers the budget rests on.
Your launch-budget checklist
Project notes: counting every pound
▸ From the notebook · optional reading
Building a £6,000 launch budget for the proofing box in Stockport, and why the CAC ceiling, not the total, was the number that mattered.
3 min read · click to open
Dan and Anna Hartley were bootstrapped, with a small grant on top, and every pound was accounted for. The first instinct was the usual one: “Let’s put a number on marketing and spread it about a bit.” I asked the only question that decides a launch budget: “What’s the most you can pay for one customer and still make money?”
Starting from the margin, not the spend
We worked the margin first. £149 retail, a £38–55 build cost, so roughly £94 to £111 of headroom per unit before acquisition and fulfilment. That headroom set the ceiling. We pegged CAC at £30, deliberately conservative, so even a soft channel left the unit profitable.
Only then did we set the total: £6,000 across eight weeks, ring-fenced so a slow opening could not eat into the cash that paid the factory.
Where the pounds went
The allocation followed the buyer. The Sourdough School audience was the exact baker who would pay £149, so it took 60%, and its measured CAC came in under £20, comfortably inside the ceiling. DTC content and email took 30%. The last 10% was a test pot for one paid channel, which we would only scale if it proved a CAC under £30.
It didn’t. The paid channel came back at £52 a customer, well over the ceiling and over the margin headroom once fulfilment was counted. “That one’s losing us money on every sale,” I told Dan, and we cut it inside the first fortnight. The stop rule did its job. The £600 not spent there went into a second Sourdough School slot that was already paying back.
The lesson the budget taught was unglamorous: the total spend is the least interesting number on the page. The CAC ceiling, set against the margin, is the one that protects you. Get that wrong and a bigger budget just loses money faster.
— Deliver stage, project notes, 2026
— Next in Deliver → Marketing plan